Thursday, March 3, 2016

So, Was Adam Never The Original Plan? It was Always Jesus?


1 Peter 1:23

You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

Born anew, born again, born from above, born in the Spirit, I am sure there are others.  A central metaphor of the Christian church is this second time around thing.  Jesus is the second Adam.  Why?  Because the first Adam did not quite work out the way God set things up.  I was going to say that Adam did not work out exactly as God had intended, but this is God we are talking about.  How can something NOT work out the way God planned?

So the plan was then for Jesus to come all along.  What an interesting plan.  God set in motion the creation of humanity with the fall of humanity already factored into a long game that involved God’s own incarnate presence (that means present in human flesh) in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity.  So the point of Genesis 1 is not the Fall of Humanity. 

The point of Genesis 1 is John 1, where the Creation is repeated, but with Jesus integrated into the process. 

Now, this ‘born anew’ thing connects to a metaphor of death, sorry, reality of death.  Because Jesus died, on the cross, and was born again-born anew-on Easter morning. 

But for Peter, this is not the center of the work that Jesus has done among us.  Because it follows on to the previous sentence, which talks all about that purifying of the soul and obedience to God and such.  All of that was for a genuine mutual love to exist between the believers.  It was an emulation of the love God has for us. 

Being born anew, that is a next consequence of obedience, something more that God gives us.  This now speaks of our individual relationships to God.  It comes after the community relationship to God, a relationship marked by love.


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